My Wishes: Your Plan for Communicating and Organizing the Essential Information Your Family Needs

My wife and I don't have a large estate to pass on to our two children. But we would like to leave as much of it to them as we can and avoid as much probate and taxes as possible. Being a hopeless do-it-yourselfer, I started browsing through the estate planning section at the local Barnes and Noble. That is of course until I came across this gem. My Wishes had everything I was looking for and quite a few things my wife and I never considered. First of all, My Wishes is written in English and not legal jargon. I found it to be very easy to read and comprehend. All the legal documents I needed were in the book. For the most part, I just copied them and filled in the blanks. I took the author's advice and had the documents notarized so that there wouldn't be any dispute as to their authenticity. My Wishes also has several organizational pages and check lists that I found very useful. What really impressed us - and something we were not expecting, was the way the author tells the stories of other people he's known and worked with. My wife took several of the stories to heart and acted on them. She gave one of our daughters our fine china, our silverware to our other daughter, and split the crystal between them. These were things my daughters have adored sense childhood. It gives my wife immeasurable joy to watch her girls enjoy a gift that only her parents could give. I'd like to add that lately we've been invited over to dinner and to play with our grandchildren with much more frequency. Just this one tip alone was well worth the price of the book! - Phil